Care for your roots – Get more shoots

Roots are the most crucial element of a plants health and growth. Healthy roots encourage exceptional growth. They are the part often forgotten about as they are not visible, but should be at the forefront of every growers priorities. Treat your roots right and growing can become a much easier task, damaging your roots (e.g. by overwatering) can lead to the death of your plant!

Large, healthy roots increase nutrient uptake, giving plants the strength they need to produce large, flavourful fruits. There are some brilliant products on the market today to help ensure your roots are of optimum health.

Root stimulants do what they say on the tin - enhance root growth in young plants. Containing plenty of bio-stimulants and hormones to encourage rapid root growth, root stims are designed to be easily digested as they are meant for young plants that may still struggle to take up nutrients.

Plant Magic root stimulant is a premium blend of beneficial, growth-enhancing substances that have been pre-digested making them easily available to the plant. This also gives it the rather unappetising smell, despite this we’ve only ever heard great things about it!

Mycorrhizae are the fungi that populate plant roots. This may not sound like a good thing, however they are equivalent to the beneficial microorganisms that us humans have in our guts. Mycorrhizae do two major things:

They extract nutrients from the soil and exchange them with plants. Plant roots can be incredibly inefficient at extracting nutrients from soil but with the help of a mycorrhizae they can extract a lot more. In return, the plants feed the mycorrhizae sugars which they need to survive. As a comparison, the mycorrhizae are to plants what fire is to humans (bear with us). We could survive without it and eat raw food, but once cooked most of it is much better for us and easier to digest. In return we have to look after the fire and feed it wood. Odd analogy we know, but we’re geeky scientists, it’s the best we could come up with.

Mycorrhizae also connect plants to each other. They form a network between the roots of different plants which, in forests, has been referred to as the “wood wide web”. This network allows for exchange of substances between different plants, including nutrients, sugars and even warning signals, for example regarding pests and disease.

Rooting Gels are also available when propagating cuttings. They are great for increasing the chances of roots forming and for reducing rooting times so plants can be transplanted quicker. They contain plant hormones that accelerates root growth and are designed to stick to the cutting surface to provide protection.

Prof O.T